The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
As Ryan said, Brundage sets his framework, “struggles over the control of public space,” clearly and early (7). Following the introduction, the reader is introduced to nearly parallel stories of whites’ struggle to dominate public memory followed by black reaction to that construction. Brundage, more than Blight or Neff, allows space—even in the pages of a book, the struggle for a precious commodity—for both white and black attempts to create their own “useable past” (222).
From the subtitle, we know Brundage has chosen to focus on the race criterion more heavily than Blight or Neff. Despite this, I thought the North (as a nebulous entity) played an interesting role as consumers of the “quaintness (tourism) industry” (184).
Maybe I am overly aware of this, but again we see the commodification of public history become a, if not the, driving force of memory creation. For Blight, that manifests itself in literature: How much can be made from Sherman’s memoirs? Who would constitute an audience for black memory? At what point does black memory become salable? For Brundage, the emergence of historical tourism as a lucrative industry (307), the creation of state archives (with federal money), the development of black heritage “tours” through southern cities, all point to the particular salience memory adopts once a dollar sign is attached to it.
An interesting point that I think is new to our discussion is the telescoping of black memory. Brundage states on p. 306:
“Almost certainly too much has been asked of the new African American history museums in the South. They are expected to revise misconceptions about the past, teach inspiration lessons, attract tourists, revive troubled neighborhoods, and spur political activism. These expectations, however unrealistic, are entirely predictable. Throughout the centur after the Civil War, southern whites had looked to their monuments and museums to advance similar ends. With so few venues in which to present their collective memory, blacks understandably have anticipated that their new museums would do the work that the myriad memory theaters of whites have long performed” (emphasis added).
After so long being denied access to the public space, to the mass culture market, black attempts to produce a collective memory must necessarily be both reactive and all-encompassing. I wonder how this influenced the stories blacks crafted, and the audiences for whom they created them.
Another point Brundage makes near the end of his book is the appeal to contemporary (white) tastes of “the separation of the past and the present” (308). Perhaps this is the crux of the present-day contest between blacks and whites in the south: most whites want to construct a scenario in which the past is just that: passed. Brundage quotes a tour guide in Greenville, Mississippi who says, “It happened; this is our history. We’re different now” (312). I’d love to discuss this in the meeting today, but that sounds dangerously like erasure through banalization. Whereas for blacks, the link to the past, the tie to what came before, is an essential part of their present-day narrative, and indeed, continues to shape collective memory creation.
I think this separation may be important to us for the Dowling statue because the new narrative that was constructed with the (heavily-Irish) 1997 rededication ceremony seems to be a pretty clear separation from the “Thermopylae of the Confederacy” days of Jefferson Davis.
(Kat, I did notice the reference to Emancipation Park, and scribbled in the margins, “What do they acquire when flanked by streets celebrating a hero of the CSA?” in response to Brundage’s claim that “…such spaces acquired enduring associations with the rituals of black memory” (70).)